Proof of Work #34
Very interesting week in cryptocurrencies. The team working on Grin has suggested they might be moving away from Cuckoo Cycle, to a hybrid PoW involving Cuckoo+Equihash. Whatsminer announced an absurdly good 16nm Bitcoin miner that puts significant pressure on Bitmain (as a sidenote, Whatsminer has a hilarious name in Chinese: “shenme/什么” means “what”, “shen ma/神马” is close to homophonous and means something akin to “wat!?” but literally means “legendary horse”) and Fomo3d was actually won, by someone who performed an extremely clever attack on the bots competing for the prize (h/t to Nic Carter for this one).
Also welcome back to PoW to 0x, who got dropped from a few issues due to dumb communication errors on our part, and are now back in full force.
Personally I’ve been heads down on something new and exciting which I’ll be able to talk about soon in a Proof of Work update. Thanks as always for reading, and please let me know if there’s any way I can make this more useful for you!
Bitcoin & Friends
Jimmy on Bitcoin
BIP158/Compact Block Filters PR [ed note: light clients on BTC keep getting better]
James from Vertcoin
bech32 address support added to proxypool code here
Fixed an issue in Electrum-VTC v3.2.2-rc1 affecting sending coins for some Windows users here
JZ from Decred
Just one more feature… That’s all we’re waiting on before we can say Politeia is good to go and we start taking actual submissions. The feature in question is proposal editing, and Marco has almost finished banging it out. More details here.
Big week with 9 Decred repos receiving commits. Among them were dcrdata which had 11 commits, politeiagui which also had 11, dcrd with 5, and decrediton with 9. In all likelihood, Decrediton will see v1.3 RC2 get cut next week as we’ve caught a few issues and polished it a bit since RC1. More details here.
Zac from Stellar
No update
Privacy coins
Paige & Zooko from Zcash
Now that Sapling-compatible Zcash 2.0.0 is out, engineering is laser focused on improved wallet support for 2.0.1.
Ecosystem team is reaching out to third-parties for Sapling activation readiness, Documentation team is working on Sapling dev docs.
Infrastructure team is working to make testnet as usable as possible for Sapling testing including explorer and faucet updates. More details here.
Diego and Riccardo from Monero
Monero has updated it's selection algorithm to improve the plausibility of ring signatures. Since we can't see the spending patterns of Monero users (privacy features and all), we look at Bitcoin and fiat spending patterns and try to choose a similar spending patterns for chosen outputs. We are constantly studying and refining this selection process to always choose plausible ring members.
Smart contracting platforms
Evan from Ethereum
Truffle v5.0.0 beta released. web3js 1.0, bring your own compiler, and lots more.
Dogethereum bridge alpha to livestream on Sept 5th.
Geth v1.8.14 with Swarm v0.3.2: A full miner rewrite (!) with instant insertion of uncles into work packages which makes safer the current larger blocks.
Our ecosystem values progress and growth, so it puts resources to good use. Thus, it’s raining grants: Ethereum Foundation round 3. And ECF round 2. Plus Aragon round 2, as well as their update on rd1 grants. [ed note: excited to see the grant speed pickup. My biggest beef with most foundations is that they are too slow and stingy with grants, even when awesome opportunities are available. I whined about this to the ETH foundation folks and found that they felt the same way. Good to see action being taken!]
Zaki from Cosmos
Gaia-8001 is chugging along - more info here.
We are maybe 2 weeks away from gaia-9000 which will complete the MVP proof of stake features.We had to drop a hot fix release to fix an unbounded cache file problem. Super impressive patching performance from our validator community. Tip of the hat to bradyjoestar ,a community member, who caught the error a week ago tho we didn't realize the significance. More details here.
We are launching our 3rd Hackatom. This one will focus on tools for validators.
Tendermint exec team just wrapped up an intensive 2 day strategy retreat in Keystone. We are charged up for launch. More details here.
Kate and Dean from Agoric
Mark gave a talk to the Node.js Security Workgroup about SES (Secure ECMAScript, the secure subset of JavaScript) and the membrane programming pattern.
We released a new version of SES. SES-0.1.3 adds utility functions and fixes an accidental vulnerability in the web-based demonstration code.
Financial Infrastructure
Antonio from dYdX
Finalized designs for front end application.
Implemented minting and closing of Margin Tokens in app.
Building service to bid on dutch auctions to close margin positions.
Hiring engineers, designers, and technical recruiters full-time in SF.
Brendan and Nadav from Dharma
Nadav was featured on The Flippening.
We’re hiring blockchain engineers and full stack engineers. Check out our open positions here.
Coulter from MakerDAO
After insightful feedback from the community, we released the updated Foundation Proposal in the lead-up to the first-ever MKR vote on Sept. 12th. The team encourages all Maker community members read the five core principles of the Maker Governance philosophy carefully.
Multi-Collateral Dai is launching on Kovan Testnet September 17th! Read more in our blog post detailing the MCD updates, including formal verification, here. [ed: this might end up being a very big deal]
Phil from MARKET Protocol
Our dev team is all back in the office after vacations, and alot of exciting work is being done on our soon to be release simulated exchange environment. This will be the first time beta users will be able to trade MARKET Protocol Smart Contracts.
We also started creating some very simple demo-projects, that highlight the use of MARKET.js and how developers and partners building applications on top of MARKET Protocol can begin that process. We plan to create several of these, with full tutorial style documentation. Please take a look, give feedback (discord), or ask for any tutorials you might want to see!
In the coming weeks, we will be posting many bounties for work to gitcoin if you would like to contribute, learn more about web3 and earn some ETH, please get involved.
Robert from Compound
Continued productionalizing backend infrastructure for API servers and price oracle. Replaced Helm with Kustomize and documented entire infrastructure.
Upgraded the protocol with Pause functionality, and support for non-standard ERC-20 assets. Subject to final audit readout, the protocol is code-complete!
Completed the dApp web interface -- internal & partner testing to commence shortly!
Began planning Compound:Thesis, an educational event in early October
Layer two and interoperability
Tom from 0x
Published V2 of the Standard Relayer API.
Updated documentation and tooling to V2.
Launched 0x Portal for easy user on-boarding and relayer discovery.
Chris Kalani joined as Director of Design, Clay Robbins joined as Ecosystem Development Lead, Matt Taylor joined as Marketing Lead, and Peter Zeitz joined as Research Fellow!
Dong Mo from Celer
Backend work: we finished the implementation of monitoring service module and state management module, and several unit tests for the other main modules. We’re currently working on an implementation of the mobile interface and push notification server, with an app management server in progress.
We’ve started design on the cApp dispute flow, and are implementing dapp session management and state exchange servers with unit tests in progress!
Mobile: we’ve finished design for the wallet settings menu and app menus, and are brainstorming the off-chain wallet on-boarding flow. We’ve also conducted our first round of user testing! We’re adding multiple themes for wallets, and have enabled wallet import and creation. We’re currently working on token sending flow, displaying more detailed data, and an improved UI. Finally, we’re working on fetching more data types, optimizing the data synchronization flow, and fixing various edge cases.
Janine from Liquidity.Network
This week we have been surveying our app users - the feedback received has been used to make the suggested UX/UI improvements. Our quest for users feedback continues please find the survey here - we believe community suggestions and ideas are invaluable to the project.
We published our #1 fortnightly business newsletter in both English and Chinese on medium - a great resource for the community to keep up to date on the latest progress, events and releases.
Preparation has begun for ETH Berlin. We are proudly sponsoring the event and mentoring at the hackathon. Come by to say hi - we have lots of swag to give away!
This week’s exercises on Achievement.Network are mainly on types - address and contract as well as built-in operations.
Alexandra from Parity Technologies
Microsoft released an Azure deployment guide to setting up a Parity Ethereum PoA network.
CTO Fredrik Harrysson wrote a blog about what it's like engineering at Parity.
Recording from Bjorn Wagner and Fredrik Harrysson's presentation on Substrate and Polkadot is out.
Cryptokitties made Jutta her own Fancy Cat, Purrity.
Polkadot UI received updates to the "Democracy" and "Explorer" pages.
Q&A with Fredrik Harrysson on open source software and the future of blockchain tech.
Web3 Foundation announced the Polkadot runtime environment grant.
Polkadot continues to upgrade itself with binding on-chain governance.
Application infrastructure
Doug from Livepeer
Livepeer shipped its Tributary Release - the first major on chain protocol update since going live on mainnet. This release enables broadcasters and developers to re-use video encoding jobs on the network dramatically reducing costs, increased networking reliability, and partial token unbonding to increase available use of funds for development, growth, and community building.
Published an overview of The Web3 Video Stack along with Felipe and Jelle from Paratii.
Ryan from FOAM
FOAM Map main net launch date set for September 4th!
We published a retrospective on our successful token launch, we are extremely excited about the global distribution of token purchasers, promising distributed growth of local FOAM communities. Purchasers are represented in: 71 of the 195 countries in the world, 25 of the 28 countries in the EU and 36 of the 50 states in the US.
FOAM and Token Foundry have mutually decided to part ways from our partnership and FOAM is no longer affiliated with ConsenSys in any form. [ed: interesting.. glad to see FOAM independent!]
David from Sia
2 Nebulous repos were updated. 1 issues were created, 0 were closed. 1 PR was merged.
GitLab user lukechampine had code contributions merged into Sia.
Lukechampine upgraded the Sia app for Ledger Nano S, that now reaches the status of beta software in this 0.2.0 release. Notably, the app is now feature-complete after improvements in security, as the transaction hash has no longer to be calculated in the computer. This means that using this hardware wallet should be safe even on a compromised computer. The app still needs to be extensively reviewed and audited before it can be released as a secure app, meant for the general public. The app can be checked and downloaded for testing here.
Not yet merged into the code, but there has been more work in progress: MSevey is improving the code related to streaming multiple files simultaneously and also made progress fixing the bug where renters could end up with duplicated contracts.
Other
Bowen from Hydro/DDEX.io
DDEX launched new features: 1）DAI market 2）Activity feature which helps users track wrap, unwrap, enable, disable transactions 3）Balance feature which helps users understand your portfolio. More details here.
DDEX mobile APP preview.
DDEX is on Status, a mobile Ethereum OS, for decentralized trading. More details here.
Ari from Decentraland
Last week, we focused on completing the refactoring of our onClick event handler for entities in the SDK. We also no longer are requiring entity IDs to register clicks.
We’ve also been collaborating with the team at Microsoft's Babylon.js, and have merged in several performance improvements to their library that we are leveraging in our engine.
Finally, we're preparing to launch the LAND Estates feature early next week.
Sam from OpenBazaar
The new APIs needed for the multi-wallet feature upcoming in the 2.3 release are now ready on the server side, and client integration is now underway. This is a major component of the new ability to use multiple coins with the same node.
Demi from Zeppelin
Decentraland deployed their first smart contract to Ropsten using ZeppelinOS, to facilitate Land management in their virtual world.
Submitted second deliverable of the Solidity Compiler Audit to the Ethereum Foundation.
Published pt.2 of our "Deconstructing a Solidity Contract " series.
Zeppelin team was in NYC and San Francisco last week meeting with 0x, Maker, Livepeer, Props, Consensys, and community members. Lots of fun!
Katherine from Messari
We made two new hires last week-- Ehud Gelblum, our new COO, and Faye Hays, Head of Design.
Integrated social sharing links on the Messari homepage stories.
OnchainFX adds a new metric: ATH and Breakeven multiple data.
Mitchell from Blockstack
Release of v0.32.2 which fixed a few bugs including one where app icons weren’t being displayed on Firefox and Safari.
Gaia 2.2.0 shipped! This has two major features – associationTokens and list-files. These are both essential ingredients for user-operated gaia hubs.